The incident seemed like so many others from this war, the kind of
tragedy that has become numbingly routine amid the daily reports of
violence in Iraq. On the morning of Nov. 19, 2005, a roadside bomb
struck a humvee carrying Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st
Marines, on a road near Haditha, a restive town in western Iraq. The
bomb killed Lance Corporal Miguel (T.J.) Terrazas, 20, from El Paso,
Texas. The next day a Marine communique from Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi
reported that Terrazas and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by the blast
and that "gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire," prompting
the Marines to return fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding one
other. The Marines from Kilo Company held a memorial service for
Terrazas at their camp in Haditha. They wrote messages like "T.J., you
were a great friend. I'm going to miss seeing you around" on smooth
stones and piled them in a funeral mound. And the war moved on.

But the
details of what happened that morning in Haditha are more disturbing,
disputed and horrific than the military initially reported. According to
eyewitnesses and local officials interviewed over the past 10 weeks, the
civilians who died in Haditha on Nov. 19 were killed not by a roadside
bomb but by the Marines themselves, who went on a rampage in the village
after the attack, killing 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes, including
seven women and three children. Human-rights activists say that if the
accusations are true, the incident ranks as the worst case of deliberate
killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. service members since the war began.

In January, after Time presented military officials in Baghdad with the
Iraqis' accounts of the Marines' actions, the U.S. opened its own
investigation, interviewing 28 people, including the Marines, the
families of the victims and local doctors. According to military
officials, the inquiry acknowledged that, contrary to the military's
initial report, the 15 civilians killed on Nov. 19 died at the hands of
the Marines, not the insurgents. The military announced last week that
the matter has been handed over to the Naval Criminal Investigative
Service (ncis), which will conduct a criminal investigation to determine
whether the troops broke the laws of war by deliberately targeting
civilians. Lieut. Colonel Michelle Martin-Hing, spokeswoman for the
Multi-National Force-Iraq, told Time the involvement of the ncis does
not mean that a crime occurred. And she says the fault for the civilian
deaths lies squarely with the insurgents, who "placed noncombatants in
the line of fire as the Marines responded to defend themselves."

Because
the incident is officially under investigation, members of the Marine
unit that was in Haditha on Nov. 19 are not allowed to speak with
reporters. But the military's own reconstruction of events and the
accounts of town residents interviewed by Timeincluding six whose
family members were killed that daypaint a picture of a devastatingly
violent response by a group of U.S. troops who had lost one of their own
to a deadly insurgent attack and believed they were under fire. Time
obtained a videotape that purports to show the aftermath of the Marines'
assault and provides graphic documentation of its human toll. What
happened in Haditha is a reminder of the horrors faced by civilians
caught in the middle of warand what war can do to the people who fight
it.